The Digital Hammurabi Podcast
The Digital Hammurabi Podcast
The Art of Weaving Myths: Emily Wilson on Writing Historical Fantasy
In this episode of Digital Hammurabi, host Megan Lewis welcomes back writer and journalist Emily Wilson to discuss her latest book, "Gilgamesh," the second installment in her epic trilogy about the Sumerians. Emily shares insights into the continuation of the story, which follows the goddess Inanna, her attendant Ninshubur, and the hero Gilgamesh, while introducing new characters and voices. Megan and Emily also touch on the thematic elements of the series, including a brief discussion of the myth of Enlil and Ninlil, with a trigger warning regarding sensitive content. This episode provides fascinating insights into how Wilson approaches Mesopotamian mythology, particularly the complexities of weaving various myths into a cohesive narrative. Listeners are encouraged to catch up on the first book in the trilogy before the third installment is released in August 2025. Tune in for an engaging conversation about ancient history and storytelling!
Megan Lewis: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Digital Hammurabi. I am your host, Megan Lewis. And today I am very excited to be joined again by writer and journalist, Emily Wilson. Emily is a full-time writer, balancing novel writing with some journalism. Her last full-time job was a five-year stint as editor-in-chief of New Scientist, the world's most popular science magazine. Emily also wrote for The Guardian for 16 years and ran the Australian branch of The Guardian in Sydney for two years. She is here to talk to us today about the second book in her epic trilogy entitled The Sumerians. The book, called Gilgamesh, picks up where book one left off following our hero, the goddess Inanna, her attendant Ninshubur, and the hero Gilgamesh, and adding in a few new voices along the way. I did talk to Emily about her first book just about a year ago, so if you haven't read it, definitely go read it and check out that interview as well. The third book in the trilogy also will be out in August 2025, so you have plenty of time to get through books one and two before then. Before we get into it, there is a very quick trigger warning we will be touching on the myth of Enlil and Ninlil, which involves sexual assault. We're not going to be getting graphic at all, but do please listen with care if that is something that affects you. All of the housekeeping out of the way. Emily, hi, thank you so much for coming back.
Emily Wilson: Thank you very much for having me, Megan. It's a great privilege.
Megan Lewis: Oh, it's so much fun. I love reading your books and I love talking to you about them, so I'm very excited for you to be here. Now, for those who didn't catch the first interview, could you just tell the audience how you became interested in Mesopotamian myth?
Emily Wilson: Circe.
Megan Lewis: It is. I think that's an excellent description of it. When you're putting all of these things together, you mentioned kind of grabbing different myths and weaving them into one whole, which is actually, for those who are unfamiliar with Mesopotamian mythology, quite hard to do because there are lots of different stories about the same deities that are occasionally contradictory. Did you find it difficult trying to meld everything into a single narrative?
Emily Wilson: completely impossible. So after a while, I just had to, once the characters were sort of up and walking around, I just had to really lean into the characters, what they were doing, where they were going and what made emotional and intellectual sense for where we were. And so like a tiny example of how you can't, you might go in with the intention of sort of including bits of myths and it doesn't work. A tiny example is with the myth of Ninlil, and Enlil, oh no no, Ereshkigal and Nergal, there's a weird thing with the chair, there's a big thing with the chair, a chair, a chair, a chair, and it keeps coming in, it's the chair, and I was like, oh maybe when she gets there he'll be on a chair, and then in the end, there is no chair now, just because you can't, you know, you can't include every motif, you can't even nod to every motif, it just becomes too complicated and too crowded, and sometimes A good example in book one is that the way the myths are or the bits are, it doesn't work for a kind of modern reading audience. So, for example, in book one, Inanna and Gilgamesh never met in my first draft. And then the readers were like, well, that's a shame.
Megan Lewis: We want to see it.
Emily Wilson: They were like, yeah, why don't they come together? And like, why doesn't he like try and help her and stuff like that. So I ended up just, I ended up, yeah, having to just go, well, this is how it really happened. You know, the myths got it wrong. Over thousands of years, errors were introduced. So yeah.
Megan Lewis: It's wonderful. Now, I mentioned in the introduction that you bring in a couple of new perspectives in this book. The first book is primarily written from three different viewpoints. You've got Inanna, Gilgamesh and Ninshubur. This includes several others, including Ereshkigal and Ninlil. Why did you decide to introduce these extra perspectives?
Emily Wilson: Well, Ereshkigal was already a little bit in book one. Why did I do it? Why did I do it? Because I've got so many main characters. It seemed like a good idea. I know, and every time someone finishes Gilgamesh and they don't say anything, they're like, oh, that's a lot of characters, I'm really pleased. So with Ereshkigal, yeah, I just sort of played around with Ereshkigal and then she became, she's a very enjoyable person to write because she's, super, she's mendacious, she's whining, hugely volatile, constantly bursting into tears, and just, you know, an absolute tigger basically, but she's also this very clever, strong, quite funny, fiercely loyal, loving person. So yeah, so Ereshkigal was one of those characters that rose up and ended up getting probably more than her quarter of book two. And then also I had this notion from the kind of fragmentary myth of Ereshkigal and Nurgle. Although I couldn't get the chair in, there's, he basically goes down to the underworld, back, whatever. And then there's this beautiful line that really moved me about, she kept saying, you know, she didn't have enough time with him. And so that felt like a real emotional something to be part of a novel, you know, her wanting more time with him. So that was how Ereshkigal got in there. And then, because the book went from being one into a trilogy, I needed a sort of an engine to sort of drive through the story, the story that kind of takes you from book one to book two to book three. And I set it up in book one There are crumbs in book one that the characters talk about the Anunnaki having come down from another realm and they had to leave. They were sort of kind of burlied out of heaven. And it's mentioned by several characters. One is Enki, the Lord of Wisdom, that it's because of Enlil's conduct that the Anunnaki had to leave heaven. So I had the sort of clues in there that Ninlil, what happened to her at the hands of Enlil, her being taken from her family, very young, was hugely significant in the story of the characters of the Pantheon. So her assault and abduction, by the way, in the book, I never describe anything. It's just you see all the kind of emotion that comes out of it. So her being taken and the vengeance that was always going to follow from her own family, was sort of the engine for it becoming a three-book cycle rather than just a standalone about Inanna becoming a woman.
Megan Lewis: It's beautifully done and there are some very surprising The character developments, shall we say, I really don't want to give too much away because I genuinely think people should read the books. And I have to say, I'm not like, this is no paid promotion. I didn't get an advanced copy. I buy these books because I really enjoy them. So I'm not like, I'm not guessing anything by telling people that they should read them. I think they're excellent books. And the way that Ninelore's character develops and the way that Ereshkigal's character develops are two of the things that I enjoyed the most, I think, about Gilgamesh. And I liked Ereshkigal in Book One, in Inanna, and you see so much more of her. And one of the things that I really do enjoy is that she seems very divorced from reality, but in a way that isn't You're not depicting her as this crazy lady, she's not insane, her reality is slightly different and it definitely is written or seems to be written as though it's a coping mechanism for a rescue girl to deal with things that have happened to her that aren't fully elaborated on. It's clear that something has happened to her that has made her unwilling to deal with the rest of her family and the rest of the world. How did you arrive at that creative decision to take Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, and make her kind of disjointed and fragmented?
Emily Wilson: Ninshubur
Megan Lewis: She's excellent. I enjoyed her a lot. Now we've mentioned a couple of times that you dive into one of the more challenging myths from Mesopotamia, the myth of Enlil and Ninlil, and this is really a key event in your writing and how the Anunnaki came to earth. Was there a particular reason why you decided to use this story as that driving force, that engine, or did it just seem to fit the best?
Emily Wilson: With all the myths, there's weird stuff in it, people born in different people's bodies, and there's one of a rape story about an Anna and a guard, you know, there's sort of There's sort of lots of grim stuff with the story of Ninlil, the little girl, and Enlil, the god, an old man or a grown man. It reads very differently, I think, from all the other myths. It reads like a crime. It read like that to me. It was quite surprising and shocking and seemed jarring. didn't seem sort of smoothed over and repeated and somehow standardised as lots of the stuff and lots of the myths. So for me, it stood out as quite an aberration and or something quite startling in the mix as something where there would be repercussions from that, you know, the little girl came from a family, there are repercussions. And so it so it did fit well, but it also made some emotional sense for people fleeing one realm and coming to another and starting over.
Megan Lewis: Thank you. As you were writing, did any of the characters surprise you particularly in the turns that they took or did they behave as anticipated?
Emily Wilson: Potta,
Megan Lewis: He's a fun character. He's definitely a fun character.
Emily Wilson: He just doesn't have actually much, compared to someone like a retrical who actually gets chapters and chapters. He doesn't get much airtime, does he?
Megan Lewis: is
Emily Wilson: Well, I suppose, as will probably be obvious to about four people, Oh, well, maybe it's not obvious. Maybe it is obvious. That the whole book is meant to be the sort of architecture. I'm trying to land like a creation myth. I'm trying to ultimately land a Mesopotamian creation myth. That's what it's meant to be. I don't know how to pronounce it properly. You will be Enuma Elish?
Megan Lewis: Enuma Elish.
Emily Wilson: Elish, OK. So that's what I'm trying to kind of ultimately, in a way, the whole thing will be. So anyone who's read that will have lots of clues about what might happen at the end.
Megan Lewis: I have to say I am very much looking forward to potentially seeing more of Tiamat because she pops up as a very peripheral character who is talked about but you don't see her in book two. and given the kind of innovative directions you've taken some of the other characters, I'm very interested to see what happens with her.
Emily Wilson: Yes, she does appear with her whole awful, they're even worse than the Anunnaki, yeah her whole family appears.
Megan Lewis: Excellent, we do have one question from the audience if I can find it, yes. Do you think that the Epic of Gilgamesh can accurately be considered the first book
Emily Wilson: As you and your audience will know really well, it was only gathered together quite late in the kind of form it is now, as a sort of set of stories and epic, and they're all on clay tablets. So it depends what your definition of book is. Are you asking, is it the first piece of literature, in which case there's some evidence that in Nana's stories, her descent her going to Eridu and attacking Enki may arguably be a little bit older, a hundred years older. But he is certainly one of the, he's either the first or one of the first two characters in literature. But yeah, I suppose you could make a big argument for the Epic of Gilgamesh in its Babylonian form being a sort of novel. What do you think, Megan?
Megan Lewis: I think that's probably a reasonable assessment. Obviously, we've got stories prior to that, but I think the Epic of Gilgamesh is definitely one of the first longer works of literature with an overarching theme. I can't think of any longer works of literature that have that kind of moralistic tendency or aim in the writer. So I think I'd be comfortable saying that.
Emily Wilson: Agga,
Megan Lewis: He does definitely gain a level of maturity, I think, through this book that doesn't necessarily come across in the first book or indeed in the epic.
Emily Wilson: Yes, exactly, yeah. So he is just, yeah, yeah. As you'll see in book three, it's not a perfect, it's not a completely smooth journey. But he's such a kind of wonderful and complicated and fun character to write about. And as I'm sure the person who asked that question is aware, his popularity for millennia is astounding. Because it's not completely obvious that the guy going to a forest, attacking some kind of monster, having a really, really, really close male friend who he then holds for seven days and seven nights until a maggot falls out of his friend's dead body's nose. All of these things, you wouldn't instantly put it all together and go, wow, that's a story that will echo through the ages. And then I suppose his journey to find immortality is sort you know, the first hero's journey, I suppose that's more, you can see, yeah, the question when immortality kind of feels like something that might ring. But, but people loved all Gilgamesh stories, didn't they? Like the Envoys of Akka, which is just a fragment of that. Yeah. King Akka coming and attacking Uruk and Gilgamesh being on the walls was copied out for literally millennia by, you'll know better than I will, by school boys, school children. They loved it. He was the kind of Marvel hero or much more of his age or a god of his age, yeah.
Megan Lewis: No, he definitely is one of those characters that really resonated with both his culture of origin, but then as clearly, given that you are still writing about him, clearly has an awful lot to offer so many hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years later.
Emily Wilson: Yeah. But he also, all the different civilizations in the region all kept embracing them, didn't they? I mean, you know, Cadians, Babylonians, or everyone who layered up on top all kept the Gilgamesh thing alive. And in a way, it's amazing that he got lost. And it's also amazing that 150 years ago or whatever, he was rediscovered and found. And in a way, obviously, your views will all know about Gilgamesh, but I'm astounded as I go around by how many people have no idea who he, never heard his name, despite his sort of great place in the history of, the history of history, you know, as this sort of first hero of history, in this place that was the first civilization, so amazing.
Megan Lewis: It is, it is. And I do think, I think a lot of this unfamiliarity with Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian literature is because for whatever reason it just hasn't, the mythology hasn't been taken up. by people like yourself, by people writing popular fiction, like we don't have, we've got a couple of comics that kind of touch on Mesopotamia but there's nothing like the Wonder Woman stories which are like rooted in Greek mythology. That does seem to be shifting and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about what you're doing because it really is helping to popularize and spread knowledge about Mesopotamia.
Emily Wilson: And when you see, you know, something I don't know if you saw the Netflix show Chaos, and it took the Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, and it, sorry, dog's barking, and it kind of took all of Greek mythology, smashed it up, exploded it in a modern setting. And, you know, with kind of modern police forces, but still human sacrifice, anyway, And it only worked, apart from all the great acting and writing, it worked because we all are so familiar, even if we don't know that we are, with Theseus, with the Minotaur, so we could just be thrown all these crumbs and go, oh, delicious. Sadly, it's been cancelled apparently, but anyway. But with Mesopotamia, we're kind of quite far from that, from people noticing Easter eggs and going, oh, that's the story about, we're like, we're not quite there yet. But anyway, I do think there are, well, my evidence of this is small, but I think the British Museum is planning a Sumerians exhibit, which is quite exciting. And I was in touch with the museum in New York that did the Enheduanna exhibition. And I think they're going to do something on Gilgamesh. And then I think quite a well-known writer is going to do a book about, a picture book about, a graphic book about Gilgamesh. So there are kind of these bits and bobs coming.
Megan Lewis: There's definitely a lot more than there was even five years ago. So I am excited about that. And thank you for all of the work that you're doing to contribute to that. We just have one more audience question, then we are going to wrap things up for the day. But someone is asking, do you have any advice for aspiring writers with stories set in the ancient Near East? Were there any unique challenges you encountered while writing and publishing?
Emily Wilson: I, um, uh, no, uh, I would have liked to have gone to Uruk and, um, uh, I know, cause I'm like on my own and at home, I don't know how to say everything as well as you or Megan, but, um, and Eridu, I'd love to go to those places, but it wasn't possible because of the security situation at the time. I think some people do go on holiday there from England, but, um, so, No. And I think that there are sensitivities around, I kind of made my Gilgamesh bisexual. And I think that's a sort of problem if you want to be published in the region. But anyway. But no, there are no particular challenges, really, other than that it's really super hard writing a book, even though it's just like typing. Or it is just, it takes a really long time. It takes a kind of unbelievable amount of discipline, rigor, in my case it takes, you know, you have to do it every single day if you want your brain to be present for that kind of creative project. So it just takes huge amounts of time. I just think like any book takes a huge amount of time, a huge amount of your brain and you have to sort of, one of my characters, Ninshu Ba, her kind of, you know, her motto is one step and then the next. And I literally, I have to say that to myself every day with book writing, because it can be so, even though if you pick up a book, you go, oh, that was yum, yum, yum, finished in four hours. To make something, you know, enjoyable can be a lot of slog. And so I, rather than, when I feel overwhelmed by the scale of the project and how it's not good enough yet by so much, and I've got to do so much more work, I, I kind of channel Ninja bars, one step and then the next I go, I will just work on this chapter. And that's what I'm going to do today. I'll do my best to do this. And so that's kind of very diffuse, non specific advice, but that was my kind of some of my writing advice.
Megan Lewis: But excellent advice. And I have to say one step and then another is something that I would definitely benefit from adding to my own daily self narrative.
Emily Wilson: When you're when you're just it's gonna be so easily in life to be overwhelmed with how much there is left to do. And the only way for me to tackle that is by just thinking about this one thing here now for a while.
Megan Lewis: Well, Emily, thank you so much for coming and talking to us. I will definitely be inviting you back on after I've read Ninchubu, which is coming out in August of next year, I believe.
Emily Wilson: Yeah, I know. Such long gaps with books, but yes.
Megan Lewis: Well, given the character's refusal to behave and all of the difficult writing process, I think that's OK. Yeah. Thank you, everyone, for watching. We'll be back very soon. Please enjoy and definitely go and read all the books. You have been listening to Digital Hammurabi, your guide to the ancient world. Thank you for joining us, and if you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like, leave a comment or review, and definitely share it with your friends. Every little bit helps get our work to an audience that didn't know they needed us. Until next time, avoid the aliens and always ask, how do you know that?